In
1889, a 5th Century papyrus was bought in Cairo by a German scholar named Karl
Reinhart. It had been found wrapped in
feathers at a Christian burial site, bound in a cover made of leather stretched
over boards. After it was brought to
Berlin, it became known as the Berlin Codex, although why it wasn't called the
Feather-Wrapped-Cairo Codex has been lost to history. It contained three complete manuscripts and
fragments of a fourth, and though all four are important, it’s the fragment—one
Gospel of Mary Magdalene—that caused the
greatest stir. Fifty years later, a
farmer found a jar of papyri squirreled away in a cave in Upper Egypt. Because the nearest town was the sleepy
village of Nag Hammadi, the trove became known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Through a series of adventures and
misadventures, including a middle-eastern blood feud, the Library didn't get
brought to general attention until the mid-1970s. Similarly, publication delays resulted in the
Gospel of Mary Magdalene not being published in English until about the same
time. Together with other manuscripts
from the finds, they have remade our understanding of early Christianity,
including the teachings of Jesus himself.
Why
is this important to us, especially on this, of all days? Well, the Gospels are bookended by Marys—the
mother of Jesus at their beginning and the Magdalene at the end, and the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, from the Nag Hammadi find, shed new
light on the latter. And considering our understanding the
resurrection has been largely through the eyes of women, Mary Magdalene in
particular, it seems to be a good time to talk about it a bit. Perhaps a better understanding of her will
result in a better understanding of Easter.
In
all four canonical Gospels, Mary is the first at the empty tomb, sometimes
accompanied by other women, sometimes on her own. In three out of the four, she’s the first, or
among the first, to meet the risen savior face to face. And in all of them, she goes out and proclaims
the Good News to the others. In fact, because
of all this, she has been known in the church as “the apostle to the apostles,”
literally “the one sent to the sent,” ever since.
But
she is not considered an apostle herself,
and the question is, why? These
days, the standard answer is that nasty patriarchy again, and that is certainly
at least partially true, but it’s more complicated than that; to see why, let's
start with Luke’s version of the resurrection, the one we just read. Like the other Gospels, he notes that a group
of women, presumably including Mary Magdalene, remains faithfully throughout
the crucifixion ordeal, the body’s removal by Joseph of Arimithea. They follow the burial procession to see
where he is laid, so they can come back and embalm his body. Then they go home to keep the Sabbath.
When
our passage opens, it's the first day of the week—AKA, Sunday—and the women—again
presumably including the Magdalene—set out to embalm him, but when they arrived
, they find the stone rolled away and Jesus not to be found. While they are standing around gawking,
behold! Two guys in brilliant, shining
robes appear beside them, and they are sore afraid. As would be any sensible person, ‘cause the men are obviously not of this world.
And while the women are groveling—again, as anybody would, unless they’re running,
feets don’t fail me now—while the women are shaking in their sandals, the men
say: “Why y’all looking for the living among the dead? Don't you remember what he told you, that he’d
be handed over to sinners, crucified, and rise again on the third day?” And with sheepish grins, the women allow
that, now that they mention it, they
do remember, and they return from the tomb to tell the eleven and the rest what
they'd seen and heard.
And
here’s the first time the women in this group are mentioned by name: “Now it
was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who told
this to the apostles.” And notice that Luke
clearly separates the women—now indubitably including Mary Magdalene—as not
“the apostles.” Now, though usually considered
the most inclusive of the gospel writers when it comes to Gentiles, Luke isn't
like that with women. Although there are
exceptions, he generally tows the first-century literary line: most of the time,
they aren’t named. It’s actually unusual for him to do so; it’s as if
he wants to connect them—perhaps especially the first-mentioned Mary Magdalene—with
his next observation: “these words seemed to [the eleven] an idle tale, and
they did not believe them.”
Now. Let’s stop right there and consider the
implication of this. Luke is writing
perhaps 60 years after the resurrection, and the twelve must have been well
known by that time, especially by his congregation. By saying that the apostles didn't believe
the women, that they considered it an idle tale, he subtly pits them—the
pillars of the ancient church—against the women, and by having Peter go right
out and discover it for himself, he
implies that the apostles—well known by that time as the one chosen by the
master himself—only believe him, even though he doesn't say so. After all, they obviously believed someone . . .
Well. Certainly all this is enough for feminist
scholars, with their hermeneutic of suspicion—their interpretive method based
on an assumption of male bias—it's enough for them to conclude they weren't
believed because they were women, and that’s probably true. But is that really enough for all the damage
done to Mary Magdalene’s reputation by the Catholic Church? After all, she was declared a prostitute on
zero evidence in 594, by no less a personage than Pope Gregory, and it wasn’t
until almost 1400 years later that the church said “oops, my bad.” What’s going on here?
Enter
the Gospel of Mary. Written in Greek
sometime early in the second century, it’s attributed to Mary Magdalene, which
is amazing enough: out of all the gospels we know of, it was the only one attributed
to a woman. What it does do is provide a significantly different account of early Christianity than the master story we
all grew up with. You know the master
story . . . It's the one that we Christians have been bathed in, nourished on,
spoon-fed since we were knee-high to a grasshopper. According to scholar Karen King, it goes like
this “Jesus reveals the pure doctrine to his apostles, partly before his death
and partly in the forty days before his ascension. After Jesus’s final
departure, the apostles apportion the world among themselves, and each takes
the unadulterated gospel to the land allotted him. Even after the death of the
disciples the gospel branches out farther. But now obstacles spring up to it
within Christianity itself. The devil cannot resist sowing weeds in the divine
field . . . [and] true Christians blinded by him abandon the pure doctrine.” This pure doctrine, handed down pristine from
Christ himself, became orthodox, and anyone who strays from it will surely go
straight to where it's awful hot, even though the sun don't shine.
Problem
is, the Gospel of Mary and other recently-recovered writings, blow this theory
wide open. They show that there wasn't
any pure doctrine agreed on by all the apostles, and that instead, early
Christianity was a bubbling stew of competing flavors. Neither was it led by an all-male cadre of
apostles directly descended from those first twelve (the remaining eleven plus
Paul) but instead by a variety of different kinds of people, including (gasp!) women!
The Gospel of Mary depicts Mary not only as a full-fledged apostle,
but first among them. Jesus’ favorite, a beloved apostle, one to whom
he imparted teaching not given to the others.
At the request of Peter himself, she tells him, Andrew and another
apostle what Jesus said, and Peter does believe her because, as he says, “Would
the Savior speak these things to a woman in private without openly sharing them
so that we too might hear?”
But
the Gospel of Mary might be dismissed as a one-off product disgruntled, second-century
feminist if it weren't for the Gospel of Thomas. This gospel was written much earlier, about
the same time as Luke and Matthew, or perhaps even earlier, and contains what scholarly
consensus says are the actual sayings of
Jesus. And the very last segment corroborates the incident between Mary
and Peter. “Simon Peter said to them all: Mary should leave us, for women are
not worthy of this Life.” To which Jesus
replies, “I myself will lead her, making her male if she must become worthy
like you males! I will transform her Into a living spirit, Because any woman
changed In this way Will enter the divine realm.” You can almost hear the irony dripping from his mouth: if it's so blasted
important to y’all that she be a male, I’ll make
her a male, or a tree or a rock, for that matter … I’ll make her into a
living spirit, and that’s how she’ll enter into the divine realm.
And
it's right here that we have the other reason
that the figure of Mary, and the gospels that tell about her, have been
maligned and buried by orthodox Christianity: in these gospels, instead of
believing the right things about Jesus,
things that—coincidentally, I’m sure—the church controls, it's a personal
encounter with the Christ, an experiential transformation, that is the key to
the divine realm, AKA the Kingdom of God.
And
so what about Mary, the woman at the
center of the Easter story? Was she just
a bystander, as indicated by our four Gospels—none of which are contradicted by
any of the new ones, by the way—or was she a valued member of Jesus’ inner
circle, beloved by the master, perhaps even more so than Peter, that rock upon
whom the church has been built? We’ll
never know for sure, but the weight of evidence is leaning that way . . .
And
at Easter, when our lives are made anew, when Christian hope is born anew, it is appropriate that we come to a renewed
vision of how Christ came for everyone, of how integral all people, male and female, Jew or Greek, black or white, Asian or
European, how integral all are to the
salvation story, the story of Christ rising again to new life for us all.
Especially a woman from the little town of Magdala. Amen.
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